Why Digital Rights Management (DRM) in Games Can Never Work and How to Fix it

It seems that every other week there is another developer in the press with news of their latest cockamamie DRM scheme. Every time it’s the same nonsense about protecting their IP rights, quite often delivered in arrogance over how unbeatable their latest idea is. That is how the snake oil salesmen sold it to them after all. These vain attempts to thwart game piracy consistently fail, unsurprising to anyone who understand that it’s simply impossible for them to work. Before going into the details over why this is the case or what the solutions are, let’s quickly make sure we’re all on the same page about what DRM means and some of the common schemes we’ve all come across at one point or another.

Common DRM Schemes

Most modern DRM schemes seem to be internet based, forcing gamers to have an internet connection to play games they’ve purchased. These sorts of schemes have been around for a long time of course, many not requiring the internet at all.

The latest scheme to really make headlines came out of Ubisoft with their “always on” policy. Essentially an internet connection with Ubisoft’s servers would be required constantly in order to play the game. Any break in connection meant a break in playing the game. This, of course, failed as cracked versions of the game were soon made available, eliminating this requirement – and let’s not to mention gamers refusing to buy the products out of protest resulting in lower sales.

Blizzard is taking this one step shorter with their “one time activation” required for the upcoming Starcraft 2. You won’t need to always be connected but you will have to have an internet connection at least initially. This has been tried countless times and always fails as cracks and patches become available to put the software in the activated state. Legitimate consumers without internet access get punished while the pirates are unaffected.

Other common schemes include limiting the number or installs or activations (though somewhat less common in gaming), requiring registration with a unique serial key, requiring the disk to be in the drive to play (deprecated with the advent of download only versions), and even the infamous third party software installs such as SecuROM.

C&C4′s ridiculous DRM causes you to lose progress (unable to save) if you lose connection for an instant, even in single play!

Why DRM Always Fails & Will Continue to Fail

According to game developers, the goal of DRM is to ensure only those who have legitimately purchased the game can play it. The general strategy that is pursued by all DRM “solutions” (used very loosely) is to control how the user uses the product. In regards to gaming, the root problem can be best summarized in the following, simple quote:

The client is in the hands of the enemy.

To help understand this I’ll use a simple analogy wherein instead of a video game the product is a slice of pizza. Imagine that a pizzeria decides they want people to eat their pizza from center to crust, only one slice per person and to eat the pizza exactly as it is served. They claim this is how pizza is best be enjoyed and want only the best experience for their customers. This would create some rather obvious problems. How do you stop someone from eating the crust first? How do you stop them from modifying a slice of or whole pizza, adding toppings beyond what the pizzeria offers, or folding it in half before eating? What if someone wishes to use utensils? How do you stop someone from sharing a slice with a friend, or cutting it in half, etc.?

The simplest and most obvious answer is that, of course, it can’t be done. Once the pizza is given to the customer and out of the hands of the pizzeria, the pizzeria loses all control over how it is used. It is effectively in the hands of the “enemy” – those who would use the product in ways other than what the producer intends. People will eat their pizza any way they please and nothing can be done to stop them. They may use it in any number of ways either against the producer’s intent or in ways completely unpredictable and unthought of – there’s nothing the producer can do about it (short of having a “pizza police” physically watching everyone eat pizza, which would be rather impractical).

Exceptions of course come about where the law is violated. Laws limit what consumers may do with their products and most commonly concern reproduction, distribution, or sale. In these cases there is legal recourse the producer may take that has nothing to do with their DRM efforts.

The same types of unsolvable pizza problems are exactly what video game DRM foolishly attempts to solve. To be more accurate, it would seem they are being sold snake oil promising to solve them.

Through DRM, developers are attempting to control how the users experience their games. Those “pizza problems” only compound when dealing with virtual goods due to intrinsic properties of virtual goods, allowing them to be copied and distributed far easier than physical goods. This is at the core of why DRM can never work. In order to control precisely how a game, or indeed any product, is used one must control everything the user does with it. This is extremely impractical for obvious reasons!

Without going into too much detail, games typically (almost exclusively) follow the client-server model. The game client refers to what you (the end user) install on your hard drive, or have on disk, while the game server, an optional component in games, is stored elsewhere and generally remains under the developer or a third party’s control. This is where the “client” from the above quote comes from – it’s not in reference to a person or entity!

The Brads put together this short comic illustrating the point, click to go to it.

DRM and the Bottom Line

There seems to be a disconnect in the true intention of DRM and the strategies pursued.

From the business perspective, game companies are there to make as much money as possible. It doesn’t matter what portion comes from market sales vs. DLC vs. subscriptions or any other segment, they are concerned with the bottom line. The theory is that strong DRM will force people to buy the game and make pirating impossible, resulting in higher sales revenue.

Often a company will drastically over inflate the sales they are losing to piracy, making rash assumptions such as every pirated copy is a copy that someone would have otherwise bought. Yet, time and again it has been the case that pirates are unaffected while the paying consumer is the one who suffers.

Not only does the DRM solution add additional cost to producing a game, it also turns users off from purchasing the game in general as they feel it will not let them use the product as they wish, reducing sales. The simple reason DRM fails is that while a game company can limit how it’s paying customers use their product, the DRM does not affect pirated copies which remove it entirely – it does nothing to address the real issue. In short, DRM HURTS, not helps, the bottom line, and encourages, in fact REWARDS piracy rather than discouraging it.

So What’s The Solution?

In order for game developers to properly combat piracy in games and increase their revenue they first must understand the reasons people are pirating games – click to read my thoughts on the matter. DRM has been found to only make worse the very issue it is supposed to solve and should be eliminated completely. While it is important to protect intellectual property rights, DRM does nothing to assist with that and merely hinders gamers. Instead, game companies would be much better off listening to gamers and addressing their reasons for pirating rather than wasting any more time on DRM which just hurts them in the long run.